Enabling Assignment Objects for Skills

Assignment Manager uses skills to compare an object being assigned directly to person or other assignee's expertise when processing assignment rules. Assignment Manager criteria and skills are related transparently in the Siebel Data Model. Skills are extensions to attribute data stored in designated skill and skill item tables. At a very high level, you can think of an assignment criterion as a skill, and each criteria value as a skill item, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Assignment Criteria and Skills Comparison

The Skill Table and Skill Item Table properties are child and grandchild tables, respectively, of the assignment object used to store skills, and skill items for assignment objects that are not stored as columns in the parent table itself. The S_EMP_SKILL employee skill table is used to store skills possessed by employees, such as languages spoken, product expertise, and so on. For example, for an employee who speaks English and Spanish, there is one record in the employee skill table that specifies the skill name as Language. There are also two records in the child S_EMP_SK_IT employee skill item table that correspond to this skill record: one record for English, and another record for Spanish.

There are several objects preconfigured for skills—Account, Activity, Campaign, Employee, Opportunity (Revenue), Service Request, and so on. By default, sales objects do not use skills. Using Siebel Tools, you enable skills for other assignment objects by configuring the object's Skill Table and Skill Item Table properties.

NOTE: Before enabling skills for an assignment object, make sure the Skill Table assignment object property exists in the Siebel data model.

To enable assignment objects for skills

Start Siebel Tools.

Select the assignment object for which you want to enable skills.

In the Object Explorer, click Workflow Policy Object, and then in the Workflow Policy Objects list, query for an object.